


Too Many Flash Fires

by Dystopia744



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: M/M, Past Relationship(s), So much angst I don't know what to say, Tagged mature for mature concepts because this is fucked up, break-ups, chain smoking, i don't even know what i'm doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 14:47:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7688578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dystopia744/pseuds/Dystopia744
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone survives the Hephaestus, but Earth is no fairytale ending. </p>
<p>Or </p>
<p>Jacobi's usual way of dealing (or lack thereof) with his problems is not working, and Kepler doesn't make life any easier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Many Flash Fires

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This is my first time trying to write for Wolf 359 so yeah, no promises. But these three have taken over my life and I had do something about it. Special thanks to type_here for reviewing this and also helping with inspiring it.

Smoke swirled up, tangling with the cigarette ashes as it climbed its way over to disappear into the streetlights. Jacobi flicked the cigarette butt off of the window sill and watched it as it fell down. He glanced over his shoulder at Kepler’s sleeping form, lying down on the right side of the hotel bed with his arm tucked underneath the pillow. He looked so ordinary when he was asleep, like a man who had just had a long day at work and got held up in traffic on the way home, and now was catching up on some needed rest. He did not look like a man who just interrogated three people and killed five, then blew their entire base of operations into smithereens.

Jacobi turned back to look outside, pulling another cigarette out of the pack with his teeth and lighting it up, leaning against the sill as he took in a deep lungful. Why was he back here? Why was he staying in Kepler’s room and not one of his own? Why was his upper arm and left hip dotted with dark purple bruises that had nothing to do with his mission?

How many times did he say he would stop? He thought that the last time had been for good. He was done, he had been done, and he really thought that when they got back to Earth this time, he would walk away and never look back at any of this.

He looked down at the cigarette burning between his fingers and scoffed to himself. Yet another thing he said he’d quit. But what was a decaying lung when you were burning away everything that made you who you are on a daily basis?

“Jacobi.”

“Mhmm.” He tossed the second cigarette away and turned around, leaning his hip against the sill, then wincing and shifting to rest his back against it instead. “Yeah?”

“This is your third night out of bed this week,” Kepler said, his voice still laced with traces of sleep that deepened it. He propped himself up on his elbows, the cover sliding off of his chest as he glanced over at Jacobi. “Still can’t fall asleep?”

“Nah, just got up for water and figured I’d have a quick smoke before going back to sleep,” Jacobi replied, “It’s nice this time of night.”

Kepler regarded him in silence for a couple of beats, then moved to sit up. “You know, you may be the best ballistics expert on this side of the world, but you’re flat out terrible at lying to me.” He motioned for him to come over, “Give me one of those.”

Jacobi crossed the room over towards the bed, stopping next to it and holding the pack out to Kepler, then lighting the cigarette for him. “I’m not lying,” he said, “I sleep fine.”

“No, you don’t, and you haven’t ever since we got off the Hephaestus,” Kepler said after blowing out perfectly round smoke circles and Jacobi actively fought the urge to roll his eyes. “You’re thinking about him again, aren’t you?”

Jacobi lowered his head briefly, his eyes fixed on the bleached, rough carpet beneath his feet, taking a deep breath through his nose. “Don’t start,” he turned away from him, heading back towards the window, “I told you I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Eiffel’s gone, Jacobi. He left. He’s somewhere living a life of his own and he’s not going to come back,” Kepler said, “There’s no point in this adolescent pining-fest of yours.”

“Did you not understand the part where I _ just _ said I don’t want to talk about this?”

“Watch how you talk, Lieutenant” Kepler said, raising an eyebrow over at Jacobi, who had his back turned to him.

Jacobi turned again, taking yet another cigarette out of the pack and putting into his mouth, his hand movements brash and unnecessarily aggressive.

“Are you seriously fucking pulling rank right now?” He looked over at him, irritation clear in the set of his features, “Do you really think this is a good fucking time?”

“It doesn’t matter what time it is, you still answer to me,” Kepler said, taking another drag out of his cigarette and reclining against the pillows. “Did you really think he was going to stay? How did you see that working out? Eiffel, joining the SI-5, coming along with us on missions, it would be like your own version of taking a romantic tour around the world.” He paused, there was a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, “Or.. You thought  _ you _ were going to leave. That’s it, isn’t it? You thought that you’re just gonna walk up to Cutter with your letter of resignation then leave Goddard and drive off into the sunset?”

Jacobi tightened his jaw in aggravation, anger flowing through his veins like a volatile chemical, bound to catch fire at the tiniest little poke, “What do you care? Huh? What’s it to you?” He asked with an impatient tone, “What the fuck does it matter what I thought? I’m here, aren’t I? You got what you wanted. Everything’s the way it was.”

“Oh,” Kepler blinked over at him, “I’m not the one who was stupid enough to want something, Jacobi. Don’t, for even a second, think you can put this one on me. You fucked it up. You’re the reason things didn’t work with Eiffel. It’s not the distance, it’s not the job, it’s you. It’s everything that  _ you _ are that he couldn’t live with.”

“Just stop, stop it.” Jacobi struggled to keep his voice levelled, his free hand closing around the window sill, “Let it go.”

“Not until you do,” Kepler put the cigarette out in the ashtray on the nightstand next to him, “Not until you can recognize how foolish it was for you to let your guard down and get carried away with an assignment. Your job was to get close to him, to gather information and keep him in line without him noticing he was being kept in line. No one told you to get attached.” Kepler’s expression twisted at his own words, “I can’t believe you would make such a rookie, cliché mistake, Jacobi. You’re too good for that. You should have been too good for that—“

“Rookie mistake?” Jacobi cut him off, this time his voice louder, and he was barely keeping it from shaking, “Yes, because God fucking forbid I would want to feel something real. God forbid, I, a human, would want to for once  _ be treated like a human _ .”

“You’re not a human,” Kepler replied without missing a beat, so offhandedly that he might have been just telling Jacobi that it was going to rain tomorrow. “You’re a fancy killer for hire. A college educated mercenary masquerading as a Lieutenant so you could legally blow people into pieces and get paid for it.” He shook his head, “So please do miss me with your ‘I want to be a real boy’ act. You live for the thrill. Our third mission, I tried to kill you and we fucked five minutes after you stopped me. This afternoon, we left a body count of five behind us and went to get tuna salad for lunch.  _ That _ ’s who you are.”

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong.” Jacobi lifted the cigarette up to his lips, a slight tremble in his fingers as he did so, “Eiffel saw something in me, and I saw something in him. He was  _ there _ for me. He,” At this, Kepler raised his finger up, giving Jacobi a half-amused, half-incredulous look.

“Don’t say it,” Kepler said, “Don’t say he loved me.”

“He did,” Jacobi said, swallowing back and casting his gaze outside the window again. The sky was a light shade of purple laced in with faint traces of blue. “He did.”

“Then where is he?” Kepler asked, his arms open wide, gesturing to the space around them, “Why is he not here now? Why does he never call?”

“He’s not—He can’t be here. I have to do my job, and he can’t follow me around, I can’t ask him to wait for me,” Jacobi said, his voice a lot lower now as he took his fourth cigarette out of the pack. “It’s just how things are.”

“Who are you trying to convince here? He didn’t go because the circumstances aren’t right. You met a million light-years away from home, and lived for three years and a half in a death trap together, the circumstances were never right,” Kepler shook his index finger, “No. He’s gone because he couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand knowing what you’ve done, knowing that he doesn’t know the half of what you’ve done. Couldn’t live with loving a man who has this much blood on his hand.”

“Kepler..”

“It’s different up there. It’s different when you think you’re gonna die every second of every day,” Kepler continued on, showing no regard for the wishes of the man who was leaning weakly against the wall, chain smoking with a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking. “But once you were both down on earth, once he remembered what it was like to be a person with a life, he couldn’t handle going back to this. And that, my friend, ain’t love.”

Jacobi snorted, a half-assed little sound, “What do you know about love?”

“I know it’s not supposed to leave you trying to burn a hole in your chest every night,” Kepler replied, always ready with an answer to everything no matter what the situation was. Jacobi hated him, he really did.

When Jacobi didn’t say anything, Kepler continued on. “And it’s not supposed to make you want to crawl into my bed every night either. You didn’t change for him, you know, even if you’d like to think you did. It was what it was, a temporary something that was good while it lasted. But nothing,  _ nothing _ good will come out of trying to restart it. As far as your life’s concerned, Doug Eiffel doesn’t exist anymore. You have to start operating under that circumstance.”

Silence.

Kepler waited without another comment for a few minutes, watching the seconds tick off on his wrist-watch, then glanced back up.

“Jacobi?”

An audible, defeated sigh.

“Warren, please,” Jacobi’s voice was a whisper this time, and it was one of the very, very few moments in all the time they had worked and slept together that he had spoken his first name. “Please stop. I can’t listen to this anymore; I don’t want to listen to this anymore.”

It was Kepler’s turn to fall silent this time, and his eyes followed the movement of Jacobi’s hand as he reached for the pack again. He pursed his lips into a thin line, “Come back to bed.” He still spoke with the same tone, but his voice had gotten somehow softer, less rough around the edges, less  _ systematic _ . “Put that down and come back to bed. We have an early flight tomorrow.”

Jacobi eyed the pack, his hand which held it paused in mid-air. He took in another deep breath, then pocketed it again. He closed the blinds, and made his way back over to the bed. Kepler couldn’t properly see him now that the room was plunged back into darkness, but he felt the bed dip down and saw his silhouette as he fitted himself into his side of the bed, resting his head against the pillow. Kepler took the edge of the cover and pulled it over Jacobi, settling against the mattress himself. He rested his hand over Jacobi’s side and it took him all of two seconds to realize that his entire frame was shaking.

Without a single more word, Kepler wrapped his arm around Jacobi’s waist, pulling him slowly over to his side, his grip on him warm and secure. Jacobi didn’t budge, didn’t try to roll away, and Kepler sighed quietly. He closed his eyes, resting his cheek against the top of Jacobi’s head and trying to fall back asleep.


End file.
